Wholeness and fragmentation

A concern with issues of wholeness and fragmentation, along with a focus on the material aspects of cultural media, identifies an important area of contact between the work of cultural critic Walter Benjamin and that of Lukacs.

In the important essay "The Storyteller," Benjamin argues in a mode reminiscent of Lukacs's narrative of gradual historical fragmentation that in the modern world the ability to tell meaningful stories is rapidly becoming a lost art. Storytelling for Benjamin is first and foremost a means of conveying advice for dealing with "real" life, but he suggests, writing in the tumultuous days of post-World War I Germany, that the modern world no longer makes sense. "Reality" itself is thus increasingly problematic, and there is no longer any meaningful advice to give. "The art of storytelling," he writes, "is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out". Benjamin suggests that events in the modern world (particularly World War I) have led to a general devaluation of human experience:

"For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power". And if experience is no longer meaningful, then it follows that the exchange of experiences in meaningful ways (the fundamental requirement of effective storytelling) is no longer possible".

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Growing fragmentation in literature

The philosopher Lukacs sees nineteenth-century capitalism resulting in a growing fragmentation in life.

He believes that literature and culture undergo a corresponding tendency toward fragmentation and loss of totality. As the nineteenth century proceeds, the bourgeoisie, now firmly in power, becomes a reactionary, rather than a revolutionary, class, and its literature consequently begins to decline in quality. For example, Lukacs characterizes the transition from realism to naturalism in European literature (epitomized by the movement from Honore de Balzac to Emile Zola in France) as a process of decay, naturalism being a distortion and deterioration of realism into abstraction.

But Lukacs's harshest criticism is reserved for modernist literature.

In essence, he believes that the formal fragmentation of modernist texts participates in the process of reification that is itself central to the fragmentation of social life under capitalism. Lukacs sees in the dazzling verbal constructions of modernist writers a reflection of this process.

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